Can you give us a bit of your background in commercial real estate, including your many trips to Saudi Arabia and their purpose?

In the early part of my career, like many developers, I worked in several commercial fields including shopping centers, office, apartments, and mixed-use developments. It did not take long to decide to focus on multi-family, both garden and mid-rise communities. For fifteen years I built apartments in numerous cities in six states. A lot of the equity for those developments was supplied by American ex-pats and Saudi investors, which necessitated a total of 23 trips to the Middle East. Those trips jump-started my interest in international travel, and hugely expanded my horizon from the small central Texas town where I was raised.